EISIL Update

The Electronic Information System for International Law (EISIL), sponsored by the American Society of International Law (ASIL) experienced outages last week. Upon request, Don Ford agreed to update the FCIL-SIS on his knowledge of EISIL’s status.

EISIL Update: In 2012, shortly after ASIL eliminated its librarian position, Barbara Bean (Michigan State University Law Library) and I volunteered to serve as EISIL’s general factota. Barbara continued training EISIL editors and I continued accumulating potential new sources for EISIL. However, since early 2013, ASIL has allowed no updating of EISILbecause to do so might crash the EISIL system, which is superannuated. This has caused the database to become seriously outdated, as no new content has been added, and existing content has not been updated.

Barbara and Don also tried to keep EISIL alive. During the period 2012-2016 there were a number of discussions, both with Elizabeth Andersen, ASIL’s former Executive Director, and with Mark Agrast, ASIL’s current Executive Director, about migrating EISIL to a new platform. In addition, repeated attempts were made to include EISIL within the broader framework of the ASIL website redesign project, to no avail. This spring, Don and Barbara felt they had to recommend to ASIL that the database be suppressed until it can be properly updated.